On 24 July 1816, a torrential rainstorm drove Mary Godwin back to her hotel in the middle of a trip. She wrote three words in her journal that day: “write my story.”
A few weeks after the ghost-story challenge at the Villa Diodati, she, Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont had left Geneva for a week in the valley of Chamonix. Mary would become Mary Shelley later. The journal line is the first direct reference to Frankenstein in her surviving journals.
The next day went better. Percy wrote from Chamonix on 25 July and described “the glacier of Montanvert, or as it is called, the Sea of Ice.” “We dined (M***, C***, and I) on the grass,” he wrote, and “walked some distance upon its surface.”
In the novel, Victor Frankenstein sits on “the rock that overlooks the sea of ice.” The mist lifts, and a figure comes toward him “with superhuman speed,” bounding “over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution.” It is the creature, and he has something to say. He tells Victor his whole story, and Victor listens: “His tale had occupied the whole day.”
The monster most people picture can barely speak. Mary’s talks for hours, on a glacier she had walked across herself.
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